I went along to my flatmate’s lectures for the week

Even medicine


As a politics student, I’m not in university that much. The course leaves me with a lot of ‘independent study time’.

I figured the best way to make the most out of the 27 grand of tuition fee debt I’ll have amassed by the end of my degree is to crash lectures outside my degree subject. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn some obscure information I’ll use in a pub quiz at some point.

I decided to take notes in the lectures, in order to blend in with the actual legitimate students, I didn’t want to be sat there like a lemon. The coherence of the notes ranged from those that could be used for revision purposes in Geography to the absolute failure to fathom what was going on in the German lecture.

It starts here

I’d managed to double my hours in university by the end of Thursday, but hadn’t even equalled the number of hours some of my flatmates have every week.

Monday, 11am, Geography

With the slating it gets, I half expected a pack of Crayola and a colouring book of ‘Britain’s greatest landscapes’. I was wrong. The lecture was on Human Geography, for a start.

I genuinely enjoyed this lecture, about Urban and Rural areas and different perception of them, and the blend of geography with sociological and political ideas was interesting. The slides were pretty photo heavy compared to most of the other lectures.  This was the lecture that related most to my home subject of politics, and one of my favourites of the week because I actually understood what was going on. Geography definitely doesn’t deserve the hate it gets.

Monday, 1pm, Law

I didn’t feel particularly excited about this lecture because it was on property law. I wanted something juicy, like criminal law. Instead, there was talk of mortgages, something none of us in that lecture hall will actually be able to have thanks to our tuition fee debt.

I genuinely became confused within the first ten minutes. Lots of legalese went over my head and made me feel dim.  The slides were very text heavy, and only slide that wasn’t was one that had a flow chart to explain the breakdown of lecture content. The sheer amount of information given in the lecture overwhelmed me, and the lecture ran over- possibly because there was just too much content for the lecture time. I don’t know how people were managing to keep up with it, I fell out of sync with my note taking and just gave up. Law should take some tips from Geography and shoved a couple of photo slides in the break up the information.

Monday, 2pm- Architecture

My final lecture of the day is a two hour one on timber and masonry construction, and the lecturer did not mess about, getting straight into the content. It was the first lecture where diagrams and charts were involved– but the mix of these and the technical jargon only served to confuse me. Definitely a lot more practical than politics, never thought I’d be sat in a lecture that dedicated an hour to timber construction.

The lecture suddenly took an exciting turn when the lecturer whacked out some samples of different materials and handed them round. A couple of bricks and some insulation. A pretty effective way to keep your students awake for whole two hours. The lecturer also compared a material called LECA to Maltesers, which just distracted me from the content and made me hungry.

 

Wednesday, 9am, Medicine

My first 9am of my university life wasn’t even politics related…

Medicine’s hours and workload are definitely at the other end of the spectrum to that of the social scientists. Whilst we had to battle with the State of Sheffield for four days, the two previous weeks Medics across Sheffield were on placement, getting up 6am or earlier and getting back 12 hours later if they were lucky.

The topic of the lecture was Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease and the Basal Ganglia (no, I don’t know what that is either). There were diagrams, MRI Images and videos of patients showing the symptoms of the diseases. The clinical relevance given in the lecture made it a little bit more understandable for a complete novice like me- . I didn’t understand a lot but the mention of amino acids reminded me of the good old days of studying GCSE biology.

I did feel a little sheepish when I skipped off to Elmfield for my seminar whilst the medics had another 2 hours of lectures before they could leave.

Thursday, 12pm, German

I knew before I’d even walked into the building that I’d have trouble understanding most of the lecture. I lived in Germany when I was a toddler but I don’t think the German I heard in Heidelberg years ago would actually help me.

The lecture was weirdly intimate, being the smallest of the week, and I felt almost like I was intruding. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the lecturer clocked onto the fact I could understand very little of the subject matter because of my blank facial expression. My notes for this lecture consisted of me asking my flatmate what was going on and whining that German words are so long. Apparently there was more English in this lecture than usual, which I put down to the fact everyone was absolutely baffled the lecturer had no choice but to explain stuff back to us in English.

There will always be rivalry between subjects over whose is the most difficult, the most employable, or the fittest- and there will never be a definitive answer, but experiencing other courses has definitely given me a renewed love for my own.